HER shoe collection has been celebrated in a Royal Scottish National Orchestra season brochure, and her husband Kennedy Leitch, who is a cellist in the same band, found television renown as a contestant on BBC's MasterChef, but Katherine Bryan is best known to Scottish concertgoers from her position as principal flute of our national orchestra, bang in the centre of the ensemble.

It is a position the glamorous blonde has occupied since she joined, straight from the Juilliard School in New York City, at the age of 21. A decade on, she had already recorded two albums of flute concerto repertoire with the RSNO for Glasgow's Linn Records when she put out 2015's Silver Bow album, on which she – somewhat cheekily, string players say – usurped the violin's solo repertoire with her own transcriptions of classical hits such as Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending and Massenet's Meditation from Thais.

The 60-minute set was a huge hit, particularly on Classic FM, a station with which the orchestra also enjoys a fruitful relationship, and selections from it still regularly feature in the music its listeners request. How to follow that up with her fourth album?

Next week Bryan releases Silver Voice, on which – and you may have guessed this from the title – she commandeers material that is usually the property of operatic sopranos.

The accompanying photoshoot has her flouncing around a London rooftop in a ball-gown – unusually shoeless – so she claims that the whole project was just an excuse to release her inner diva.

Her partners this time around are the Orchestra of Opera North under conductor Bramwell Tovey, and the label is long-established Chandos, now run by the son of its founder Brian Couzens, and for which the RSNO has recorded since the 1970s.

Bryan explains: "I knew I wanted to do this project with the opera arias and I'd talked to Linn but timing-wise it wasn't quite right with them and Ralph Couzens at Chandos loved the idea and was really keen on it. They'd got to know me and my playing through the recordings with the orchestra so the relationship was already there.

"Their turn-around is quite quick which is nice, because we only recorded it in May in Leeds Town Hall. Opera North obviously perform a lot there and I thought it would be good to use an opera orchestra. But I was nervous about that as well, because they really do know the rep and how it should be done."

Bryan had the concept of the album clearly mapped out in her head, bracketing a selection of well-known arias with two suites of music from The Magic Flute and Carmen that were already arranged for flute and orchestra.

"Choosing the arias was the difficult bit. That research and transcribing took a long time, because there are so many out there. I always thought that soprano and flute would go hand in hand but actually when I played the arias at pitch they sound really low and mellow.

I wanted to keep the original key, so that gave me the opportunity to play around with different octaves and hear how that would change the character of the sound.

"Originally I thought that the Queen of the Night [from Mozart's Magic Flute] would be ideal, but that didn't work at all. The vocal virtuosity is not that difficult on the flute so it didn't have the same magic when I played it, whereas I found some of the more lyrical, slower arias much more of a challenge and they pushed me to get the most out of the phrasing and the lines."

The ones Bryan eventually selected include many that will be very familiar and are certainly radio-friendly: the "Jewel" aria from Gounod's Faust, Dove Sono from The Marriage of Figaro, the Flower duet from Lakme by Delibes, Song to the Moon from Rusalka by Dvorak, and Gershwin's Summertime from Porgy and Bess. Even people who have never seen a complete opera will recognise most of the tunes on the album – but they will probably not have heard them performed by a flautist, and that is exactly the point as far as Bryan

is concerned.

"I want to show that the flute is more than many people think it is. As a musician, I don't want to be thought of as just a flute player, because the flute is sometimes overlooked as a solo instrument, and I want to show that that needn't be the case. The best musicians transcend the instrument that is in their hands.

"People think of the flute as lightweight emotionally and a bit limited. It doesn't have as large a dynamic range as some other instruments, but there is so much you can do with the different colours of the sound, in the shape and depth of the sound. That's what I love exploring and with this album particularly it's allowed me to do that more. Thinking of the instrument as a voice forces you to analyse every sound you make. If I didn't do that as a player I would be really bored.

"The flute and the voice are so connected anyway that the idea was there for the taking. I've always taught students to think in the way a singer would in terms of the way you breathe. But then every single instrument, including string instruments, needs to think vocally because the voice is the most natural instrument.

"There were more obvious technical challenges with the repertoire on the violin album because violinists don't have to breathe to phrase the music. The organisation of the transcriptions was more complicated, but this album was emotionally much more challenging, partly because to begin with I couldn't actually play a couple of them through without crying!"

As well as her full-time job at the orchestra, Bryan teaches eight students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and once a month at Chetham's in Manchester, where she began her own studies. Early in January she runs her own international residential course for flautists at Ardoch on Loch Lomond, not far from her home, with colleagues on hand for chamber music partnerships and her husband overseeing the food. And that's all in addition to "keeping a solo career bubbling away", as she puts it.

"I love the role of the flute in all the repertoire that we do in the orchestra but I also love being a soloist, and it is very difficult to persuade orchestras to programme flute concertos. I do sometimes think that if I played the violin it would be so much easier. But I can't imagine playing anything else, while I can imagine being a singer – although I am a terrible singer, and my voice is really low! But my style of playing is closer to that of a singer than to any other instrument."

"Being a principle flute and being a solo flautist is very different – it would be a bit like asking Andy Murray to play badminton. I'm holding the same instrument but I'm doing something very different. But I am so lucky that I get to do both these things, because they do benefit each other."

Katherine Bryan's Silver Voice is out on Friday on Chandos